The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

So I was rummaging through our hall closet at home and I came across my dad's old literature anthology from college. This presented me with a fascinating moment for self-reflection. I have always taken an instinctively pragmatic approach to evaluating works of fiction- is the work instructive? redemptive? satisfying? and ultimately, is it entertaining?- rarely able to muster up sufficient appreciation for the darkly profound or avant-garde.

I believe this tack stems, at least in part, from a conviction I've intrinsically harbored that a work is not worth reading if I could not in good conscience recommend it to my dad, whose own tastes, indeed, I have often seen mirrored in mine. When I was in the sixth grade I discovered Jules Verne, and I gleefully passed on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island to him after I devoured them. We marveled at Verne's clairvoyant depictions of scuba diving and delighted in the re-emergence of Captain Nemo together. Excellent books to be sure, but, as I learned later, essentially only science fiction, turn-of-the-century boys' adventure novels, and not necessarily the revered classics that for many years I'd held them to be, on par with Faulkner and Hemingway and Joyce, who figure heavily in the aforementioned textbook, and for whom I retain respective distastes.

But it was within this textbook that I found Tolstoy's delineation of death. Ivan Ilych contracts a fatal illness and declines rapidly. He is, until this point, a self-satisfied middle-aged judge well-situated in life with a wife and children. The realization that he is dying devastates him. The heretofore self-sufficient man cries out to God: "'Why hast Thou done all this?'" He recalls the major events of his life and marvels that it should end in such a manner. "'Maybe I did not life as I ought to have done,'" he muses. "'But how could that be, when I did everything properly?'" In the agony of his final days he is unable to continue to justify a life spent striving for power and reputation and position. "He tried to add, 'Forgive me'...knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand."

The story ends with an allusion to a verse of Scripture my dad is fond of quoting: "He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?'" mirroring, of course, Paul's defiant "Death, where is thy sting?" And so, amidst the scathing social commentary, the sardonic irony, and the esoteric symbolism of the untenably profound, I encountered a story of which I could say to my dad, "Here, read this. It's really good."

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's work, while fixated on the countryside, is rarely pastoral and idyllic. Rather, his is a world of determined, pervasive melancholy. Still, he provides instances of redemption, and his dramas are never tedious. The Mayor of Casterbridge satisfied me, so when I saw The Return of the Native at a library book sale, I capitalized on the opportunity to repeat the feeling.

Hardy opens with the heath. "Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity." Egdon Heath proves to be almost a character here in Hardy's novel. The heath does as much to alter the fates of the principal players as they themselves do. Its atmosphere, to some familiar and comforting, to others stifling and oppressive, permeates every scene and action. The plot is one of diametrically opposed lovers whose rash and desperate attempts to orchestrate events to suit their own whims end in tragedy. The heath bears witness to their futile drama, reflecting upon its face a "black fraternization" with its ill-destined inhabitants.

The story is winding and captivating; suffice it to say several intertwined individuals of the mid-19th-century English countryside become yet more closely and convolutedly related when the eponymous native, Clym Yeobright, interrupts the natural course of things and drastically alters life in Egdon Heath. Clym falls in love with Eustacia Vye, an idle, beautiful woman secluded in her grandfather's home, desperate for the imagined pleasures of the city. "The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine."

She bewitches Clym, and they are soon wed. But her capricious dissatisfaction and blind selfishness have tragic consequences, ending ultimately in death, for her and two others. She rekindles a relationship with Wildeve, who is lately married to Clym's dear cousin. While harboring him in her house she neglects to answer the door when Clym's heretofore estranged mother comes to reconcile. Distraught, and believing Clym condoned Eustacia's refusal to admit her into their home, his mother wanders on the heath in the rain, and after being bitten by a snake, dies. Eustacia later determines to flee abroad, aided by her lover, but in a wonted fit of passion drowns herself. Wildeve perishes in an attempt to save her, and Clym just escapes with his life.

Eustacia destroys all that she touches with her self-absorbed ambitions. "Yeobright," however, "loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather that affluence." Why this astute, intelligent man fresh off the streets of 1840s Paris should be so deceived as to make such an unworthy alliance is hard to determine.

Clym dreams of opening a school to educate the villagers of Egdon, much to the chagrin of Eustacia. When his eyesight is temporarily strained, restricting him to "furze-cutting" on the heath to earn money, Clym is not daunted. He throws himself wholeheartedly into the endeavor. "He is set upon by adversities," says Hardy, "but he sings a song." While he is merrily serenading the heath in the glow of his exertion, Eustacia happens upon him. Furious that he could enjoy engaging in the work of a commoner while she too is living like one, she unleashes her wrath upon him, the touching portrait of a man afflicted and nonetheless happily laboring in what capacity he can slashed to shreds by Eustacia's vindictive ranting.

Eustacia, retaliating against Clym as the source of her unhappiness, decimates his chances of achieving anything but, though Hardy does grant Clym an epilogic career as a travelling preacher/moralist. Is beauty truly such an inescapable snare, that a circumspect scholar would fall victim to a conniving, vindictive woman whose chief, and perhaps only virtue, is her face?

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

"I wanted him to give me wisdom," Augie says of a venerable businessman, and says, essentially, throughout his reminiscences. Augie March recalls his impoverished childhood in a Jewish neighborhood in the in the 1920s, continuing the narrative into his adolescence and through to his adulthood in post-WWII Europe. He describes his jobs, his friends, his romantic forays, and his travels- from Chicago, to Mexico, to New York, and finally abroad. His exploits are, as they have often been described, picaresque. Augie is not always above the law, but when he strays, we go right along with him.

Augie is continually caught up in the whirling eddies of strong personalities. One of his first jobs involves assisting a paralyzed business eccentric whom he reveres as a genuine genius, and later he steals textbooks with a Mexican math whiz on scholarship at the University of Chicago. Augie is perpetually seeking knowledge and, as he said above, wisdom. He begins to read the textbooks before delivering them, and he becomes enraptured with the ideas he finds. “I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man.”

The book is dauntingly long, for Augie’s life is made of innumerable adventures, no detail of which he considers too small to include. Bellow composed complex sentences of description- clause piled on clause, with illustrative concrete nouns and reclassified verbs stacked precariously atop the subjects and predicates. Augie employs esoteric allusions abundantly, almost obnoxiously, as if Bellow wanted to underscore Augie’s self-education, evidence of his having read widely and deeply without perhaps a tempering authority to guide him in the proper deployment of such potent arsenal.

Augie uses very little foreshadowing, restraining himself to telling the story as it happens, avoiding bracing suspense in favor of a more natural revelation of events. Augie traces the development of his perception of himself as the events are unfolding, coming to a refreshing self-awareness towards the end. “I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man’s character is his fate. Well, then it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character.” Though his character-as-fate theory is nebulous and indefinite at best, the underlying current of personal responsibility that he espouses is a worthy conclusion.